NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explains OpenGL’s 15x Performance Gains

The gaming hardware industry’s giants, nVidia, AMD and Intel, in a rare event, shared the same stage at this year’s Game Developers Conference to explain some high level concepts about OpenGL to developers through which they can easily get a boost of nearly 15 times the normal performance.

According to AMD’s Graham Sellers, Intel’s Tim Foley, and nVidia’s Cass Everitt and John McDonald, who appeared on stage and shared the same panel during the discussions, these high level OpenGL implementations can actually reduce the driver overheard by as high as up to 10 times the normal way. In addition, they also mentioned during their presentation that with proper implementations of these high level OpenGL techniques the driver overhead could be reduced to almost zero. What’s more is since OpenGL is multi-platform; it can easily reduce the workload for the developers to support multiple platforms at the same time.

Not only is that, being vendor independent means OpenGL available for any hardware platform without the need of custom software or APIs. They even goes further saying that using OpenGL in itself can result in a performance improvement of 1.3 times by default, but by tuning the API and the implementations a bit further, that performance boost can be pushed to as far as 10 to 15 times the original performance. This is largely due to the fact that OpenGL reduces the driver overhead associated on the desktop system, where the driver overhead results in lower frame rates. This issue just gets worse when it is taken to the mobile platform, where the battery life too takes a hit in addition to the frame rates.

The panel even had demos showing off these improvements to the audience. For those more technologically inclined, they can check out the YouTube video showing the Cass Everitt and John McDonald giving a talk at Steam Dev Days.

About Partha Das

Lover of food, books, anime, movies, music, tech, games and sleep. Hobbies include cooking, drawing, tinkering, coding, electronics/robotics and general mad-scientist stuff. Love to learn different languages and about different cultures and trying out new things. Currently learning Japanese and Korean too!
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